Suky Best & Rory Hamilton
Cowboy Series

UK, 2005, digital video, 7 min 3 sec

Village Gunfight, 2 min 29 sec
Stranger in Town, 1 min 46 sec
Interlude, 1 min 19 sec
Train Hold-up, 1 min 29 sec

Suky Best is an artist working with print, animation and video; she lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions of her work include: Return of the Native, Pump House Gallery, London (2005); Wild West (with Rory Hamilton), Danielle Arnaud, London (2005); and Recent Work, Danielle Arnaud, London (2002).

Rory Hamilton lives and works in London. His recent solo exhibitions and digital projects include: Arts Centre Nabi (with Jon Rogers), Korea (2003); The Brunswick Project, London, (2003); and Generic Sci-Fi Quarry (with Jon Rogers) (2002). www.daniellearnaud.com

Suky Best and Rory Hamilton’s collaborative animations take archetypal scenes from classic cowboy movies and remove everything but the silhouette of the hero (and his horse), in order to explore his mythic status and the filmic structures that support this. For the artists, the cowboy represents ‘a heroic symbol’; they direct our attention at certain moments which, despite the lack of visual information given, are instantly recognisable as conforming to narrative conventions of the cowboy genre – a stranger arriving in town, a gunfight in a bar, a train hold-up. The original films are unidentified but the scenes remain familiar nonetheless. Some of the works represent a transcription of a classic scene while others show scenes from several cowboy movies. These collaged works depict instances of the archetypal kiss scene or the decisive gunshot, moments of cliché and repetition within the genre.

The films are painstakingly hand-animated frame by frame using a technique called rotoscoping. In this technique the original films are turned into still photographs that are then interpreted by the animators. Employing a technique called occlusion in which figures and objects are only made visible as the hero passes behind them, the viewer is able to hold and interpret such imagery and recreate a complete film scene. As such, the mythic figure of the hero – the only figure we actually see – somehow creates the world around himself as he moves through it.